Musicians: Marketing Is Part Of Everything You Do

As part of our 9th Anniversary, we asked our regular contributors to share their favorite Hypebot posts. This one comes from Hypebot Senior Contributor Clyde Smith.

For many people the term "marketing" conjures up images of cheezy advertising or pushy sales people or wack gimmicks to catch the attention of the press. So if you're a musician that equates marketing with those things, it's understandable that the idea that you need to market yourself and your music makes you really uncomfortable. But if you understand that marketing is part of everything you do, you can then begin to spread the word in a productive positive manner.

Musicians who only see marketing as an annoying, interruptive process of shouting at people aren't going to see it as something they want to do. And if they see marketing as something pushy and rude, then when they embrace marketing as a way to spread the word about their music, they go into full-on spam mode and alienate everyone around them.

Even many business people look at marketing as a necessary evil, something that's somewhat beneath the creativity of the true entrepreneur. For example, noted venture capitalist Fred Wilson once wrote a blog post telling startups to avoid marketing as a component of their business plans. Instead he advocated that they do a lot of other things that ultimately sounded like a list of marketing tips.

Fred Wilson proposed that instead of marketing, one should spread the word through such things as:

social media
word of mouth in a specific community
live events
having a good story, bypassing publicists and taking it straight to the press
search engine optimization

Of course, these are all forms of marketing and these are all things that any good music marketer will suggest you do as part of your ongoing activities. Because marketing is about spreading the word about what you're doing. At its best, marketing is spreading the word by speaking to other humans in a human voice.

Good social media marketing is what The Cluetrain Manifesto describes as having conversations in a networked market:

"Conversations among human beings sound human. They are conducted in a human voice."

"Corporations do not speak in the same voice as these new networked conversations. To their intended online audiences, companies sound hollow, flat, literally inhuman."

When one starts to understand marketing in these terms, as spreading the word and as having human conversations, one can begin to understand how marketing is part of everything a musician does.

But it's also important to understand branding as a component of marketing.

Some people think of brands as logos or as corporate identities but a brand is essentially the image or thought that immediately comes to mind when people think of you. So your brand can be thought of as your personal and professional identity in the minds of people other than you.

If marketing is what happens when you are showing who you are to the world and are spreading the word about what you do, then marketing is part of everything you do, at least, when it involves other humans.